Elizabeth Edwards again sharing the stage in Iowa

[surfermaw]

Elizabeth Edwards again sharing the stage in Iowa
Husband's campaign hoping her return to the trail propels him to win on Thursday
JIM MORRILL
[e-mail]
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EMMETSBURG, Iowa --Elizabeth Edwards had heard enough.

A man had just told her husband, Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards, that Michelle Obama said his decision to abide by federal spending limits would handcuff his campaign.

Elizabeth Edwards grabbed her husband's microphone.

"I'm surprised and disappointed in Michelle," she told more than 100 people crowded into a northern Iowa restaurant.

After an absence from the campaign trail, Elizabeth Edwards is once again grabbing the mike and the spotlight in the run-up to Thursday's Iowa caucuses. It's a crucial week for the Edwardses. For political and financial reasons, experts say, Edwards needs to finish as one of the top two Democratic candidates to keep his campaign going.

WWW.Charlotte.com Todays paper

[gateley]

1. Just a comment that I really like both of those women a lot. That's all. nt

[Beaverhausen]

2. I've had the pleasure of hearing Elizabeth speak in person

She is smart as a whip, has so many facts at her fingertips, and is sweet and gracious. She is a real plus to the campaign.

[youthere]

3. A fine lady, to be sure. I have great respect and admiration for her.

[JDPriestly]

4. You decide. Obama claims he is not accepting corporate lobbyists money,

but he apparently is.

I am just posting information from articles written on the fundraising topic.

I think there is a lot of confusion on this. Edwards does not accept donations from corporate lobbyists. Clinton does. Apparently Obama does too. The much maligned 527s supporting Edwards in Iowa are independent and are funded by unions or poverty advocates. When you volunteer at the local level, chances are you may be volunteering for a 527 without realizing it.

An investment fund for philanthropist Rachel Mellon contributed $495,000 to a labor-backed group that is running ads in Iowa in support of Democrat John Edwards' presidential campaign.

A Federal Election Commission filing by the Alliance for a New America reported the donation from Oak Spring Farms LLC, the corporate entity that holds Mellon's fortune. Mellon is the 97-year-old widow of philanthropist Paul Mellon, the son of industrialist Andrew Mellon.
. . . .
The Alliance for a New America is a newly created organization headed by former Edwards adviser Nick Baldick. It has received most of its support from labor groups, many of them locals belonging to the Service Employees International Union. The alliance is spending about $600,000 on radio ads and about $750,000 on television ads in Iowa supporting Edwards.

Edwards is also getting support from another 527 group, Working for Working Americans, that is financed by the United Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners and is running television ads supporting Edwards in Iowa.

http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5iBapsJmIJxb_wYDRJGTGcwSqDr6gD8TQNRUG1

Here is some information on Obama's fundraising:
The zmag article is very interesting and every voter should read it and agree or disagree for him- or herself.

Consistent with his secret identity as a corporate “player,” Silverstein notes, Obama assiduously supported the ethanol-promoting objectives of the Illinois-based firm Archer-Daniels Midland, which has provided him with private jets on at least two occasions. He has also defended the interests of Illinois’ gigantic electrical firm Exelon, America’s leading nuclear plant operator and a company that has given more than $74,000 to his campaigns. The slim chance that Obama might ever choose “starry eyed idealism”—Silverstein’s lobbyist-informant’s way of describing the elevation of peace and justice over the imperatives of Empire & Inequality, Inc.—has probably become thinner now that Obama has recently joined (thanks largely to his latest book contract) the millionaires’ club.

http://zmagsite.zmag.org/Feb2007/street0207.html

Corporate money is naturally not bestowed equally and without ideological selectivity across the field of Democratic candidates. It’s not only because his national polling numbers are below Hillary Clinton’s (who gets 1 in every 4 campaign dollars from the health-care industry) and Barack Obama’s (who gets 1 in 5 of the industry’s donation dollars) that John Edwards (1 in 20 health-care dollars) is less supported by the health-care sector than the two Democratic front-runners. It’s also because Edwards has consistently criticized his “corporate Democratic” rivals for giving giant insurance and drug companies “a seat at the table” and for preparing to “negotiate and promise way to universal health care.” He claims to believe that granting the big corporate players a role in shaping and passing health care reform dooms the process and that the only way to win meaningful change is to “fight and beat the special corporate interests again and again.” (If that’s really his attitude, left progressives might well ask, then why doesn’t he advance the obvious, popular, and social-democratic solution—single-payer?) Along with his “populist” tendency to highlight themes of economic inequality, poverty, and undue corporate influence on what he calls “the broken game” of U.S. policy and politics, such rhetoric makes the former corporation-beating trial lawyer Edwards seem like something of a wild card to big corporate political financiers within and beyond the health-care sector.

The insurance industry certainly sees Edwards as the most likely of the leading Democratic candidates to move towards single-payer—a policy he has at least once (at an AFL-CIO Health Care summit last spring in Las Vegas) partially praised—if he attained the presidency. “Over time,” Edwards promotional literature in Iowa says, his health care plan “could evolve into a single-payer approach.” The “ultimate insider” Hillary Clinton (a former corporate lawyer who represented large corporations against the medical claims of injured workers and consumers) and the business-accommodating Barack Obama strike corporate “election investors” as better bets to follow the usual Democratic practice of tempering populace-pleasing campaign bluster with “proper,” “real- world” deference to existing social and political hierarchies and priorities.
http://www.zcommunications.org/zmag/viewArticle/15933


Interesting April article on the candidates' fundraising strategies

http://nymag.com/news/politics/30634/